conspicuous consumption becomes—and the money needed to participate in it.
Anecdotal evidence in Germany has it that richer people drive Porsche but buy their
groceries at the cheapest discount stores. So once we dig deeper, we find that
happiness is an existential feeling of being on top of one’s life and its challenges.
Neither the utility of a product nor the happiness of a person can be measured by the
price people are willing to pay for something. Yet, constantly calculating costs and
benefits and guiding one’s life by comparing numbers as expressions of value
makes people lose their senses of worthiness, connection and caring.
So why should we continue to build societal development paths around the idea
that constant accumulation is always beneficial to people or society as a whole?
Well-being research helps bring to light the underlying needs that market-based
consumption is actually serving and how many different options a society has to
satisfy them. By debunking the consumption–happiness–maximization law we can
thus become creative in finding solutions for improved utility that align with Earth’s
ecosystems and other people’s needs for social relations, meaningful engagement
and respect. It becomes possible to imagine reduced production and consumption
levels without panicky reactions or unfounded excuses that doing so would necessarily decrease happiness, well-being and freedom.
This requires and enables system innovation processes that focus on unlocking
political, economic and sociocultural path dependencies that were created to serve
the stark utopia of endless gain through a market system. Thinking back to Fig. 2.5
on the materiality of ideas, we can see that creating processes with such vision and
beliefs in mind resulted in a system that had the growth imperative wired into its
functioning. This is of course the second part of Jackson’s Growth Dilemma: that
any ‘degrowth’ undertaken today—given current institutional setups—is unstable
and causes unemployment and recession. I would add the breakdown of the
financial markets. Without a doubt, instant degrowth would diminish the happiness
of many. But it is the result of a structural crisis and not of the violation of some
natural laws of human existence. Twenty-first century empirical research shows that
those do not exist.
In this the qualitative survey data of well-being research and the historical
observations of figurative sociology receive supporting evidence from natural sciences. Brain researchers have observed how our experiences of the external world
and our judgments of them find expression in the development of our neuronal
architecture. So quite literally, external circumstances, in their appearances as
social, cultural, technological and economic institutions, design our internal
infrastructure. These wirings determine how we experience and judge events now
and in the future.
“What happens in your mind changes your brain, both temporarily and in lasting
ways; neurons that fire together wire together. And what happens in your brain
changes your mind, since the brain and mind are a single, integrated system” write
Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius, cofounders of the Wellspring Institute for
Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom (Hanson 2009: 18). And the brain
changes through training just as muscles do. Hanson and Mendius quote Francisco
Varela, the famous Chilean biologist and neuroscientist, when describing this
3.1 How Mainstream Economics Views Human Needs and Their Satisfaction
77
Anecdotal evidence in Germany has it that richer people drive Porsche but buy their
groceries at the cheapest discount stores. So once we dig deeper, we find that
happiness is an existential feeling of being on top of one’s life and its challenges.
Neither the utility of a product nor the happiness of a person can be measured by the
price people are willing to pay for something. Yet, constantly calculating costs and
benefits and guiding one’s life by comparing numbers as expressions of value
makes people lose their senses of worthiness, connection and caring.
So why should we continue to build societal development paths around the idea
that constant accumulation is always beneficial to people or society as a whole?
Well-being research helps bring to light the underlying needs that market-based
consumption is actually serving and how many different options a society has to
satisfy them. By debunking the consumption–happiness–maximization law we can
thus become creative in finding solutions for improved utility that align with Earth’s
ecosystems and other people’s needs for social relations, meaningful engagement
and respect. It becomes possible to imagine reduced production and consumption
levels without panicky reactions or unfounded excuses that doing so would necessarily decrease happiness, well-being and freedom.
This requires and enables system innovation processes that focus on unlocking
political, economic and sociocultural path dependencies that were created to serve
the stark utopia of endless gain through a market system. Thinking back to Fig. 2.5
on the materiality of ideas, we can see that creating processes with such vision and
beliefs in mind resulted in a system that had the growth imperative wired into its
functioning. This is of course the second part of Jackson’s Growth Dilemma: that
any ‘degrowth’ undertaken today—given current institutional setups—is unstable
and causes unemployment and recession. I would add the breakdown of the
financial markets. Without a doubt, instant degrowth would diminish the happiness
of many. But it is the result of a structural crisis and not of the violation of some
natural laws of human existence. Twenty-first century empirical research shows that
those do not exist.
In this the qualitative survey data of well-being research and the historical
observations of figurative sociology receive supporting evidence from natural sciences. Brain researchers have observed how our experiences of the external world
and our judgments of them find expression in the development of our neuronal
architecture. So quite literally, external circumstances, in their appearances as
social, cultural, technological and economic institutions, design our internal
infrastructure. These wirings determine how we experience and judge events now
and in the future.
“What happens in your mind changes your brain, both temporarily and in lasting
ways; neurons that fire together wire together. And what happens in your brain
changes your mind, since the brain and mind are a single, integrated system” write
Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius, cofounders of the Wellspring Institute for
Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom (Hanson 2009: 18). And the brain
changes through training just as muscles do. Hanson and Mendius quote Francisco
Varela, the famous Chilean biologist and neuroscientist, when describing this
3.1 How Mainstream Economics Views Human Needs and Their Satisfaction
77